[John James Jacoby]

How I do deep integration using WordPress 2.7 and bbPress 1.0 Alpha 6.

Add to beginning of bb-config.php:

if ( !defined('ABSPATH') & !defined('XMLRPC_REQUEST')) {

define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);

include_once( '/absolute/path/to/yourdomain.com/wp-blog-header.php' );

header("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");

header("Status: 200 All rosy");

}

[John James Jacoby]

Your search is broken.

If I search for “yaris” it doesn’t find anything, even though the very first topic has Yaris in the title and body.

Otherwise to be honest, it looks exactly like every other bbPress theme out there. This isn’t meant to discourage you, quite the opposite actually. It’s a good start and it’s awesome to see another person catching the bbPress bug.

Welcome to the forum and to bbPress and keep it up!

[John James Jacoby]

I still don’t understand WHY people want to run more than WP 2.5 considering how insanely bloated it’s become and I find the new menu system annoying.

So what you’re saying is that the world shouldn’t do what you don’t think is right.

[John James Jacoby]

If I can throw out some input, having felt both sides of this debate multiple times, I think the bbPress audience is just looking for a little more information than maybe what is presented publically, and hoping that maybe it’s delivered with a little more public relations than it is firm moderation.

Lets take a moment to be honest with each other. The bbPress website, as a whole, is in bad shape. The documentation is old and outdated, transversing multiple versions and subversions of code with no WordPress style codex to whisper about. To offer a bit of perspective to everyone, bbPress is following WordPress in it’s development style, and remember that bbPress isn’t even 1.0, and WordPress is at 2.7. Where do you think bbPress will be when it is at version 2.7?

While we’re all used to how WordPress works and how convenient it is to have years of experience and knowledge to build off of, bbPress just isn’t to that level yet, and it isn’t fair to expect for it to be.

I feel that the bbPress site needs a serious update, just like the WordPressMU site does. There needs to be some uniformity and some solid public relations going on to get the message across to answer these questions before they even begin to be thoughts in a users mind, and no offense to anyone but a sticky topic isn’t enough, even though there isn’t a sticky anymore. Even if the product is free, it’s still a product, there are reputations on the line, and ultimately someone is investing in Automattic to help pay Sam’s bills, so someone needs to be nice to the customers, even if they’re not paying a dime.

Sam, if you’re listening, I’d love to help restyle bbPress.org to help it more accurately match WordPress.org/com. I would have suspected this was something done by someone specific within Automattic, but I think I remember reading that you styled it specifically yourself. If it will help take some of the burden off of you, I’d love to help out in anyway that I can.

[John James Jacoby]

I was going to recommend BuddyPress as soon as I read this. I’ve got bbPress fully integrated right now and highly recommend it for someone looking to do a pseudo-social networking site, or even an e-zine with some basic social abilities. (Sam, I’m interested in the memcache plugin though, gotta look into that. Thanks!)

[John James Jacoby]

Also don’t forget to copy over the code from the .htaccess file that bbPress semi tries to generate for you. Simply changing the setting in the drop down box isn’t enough.

[John James Jacoby]

Yeah some of my users haven’t updated their profiles, and BuddyPress doesn’t recognize them until either they do, or I force the info (which I will probably do.)

@TeddyC, it took me installing WordPressMU 4 times before I followed the instructions correctly, and I’d recommend not doing it on Valentines weekend so your girlfriend doesn’t hate you for a few days, but otherwise I think it went as smoothly as it could considering I migrated 200 users from WordPress.org/bbPress over to MU. There’s a few places where I had to trial and error my way through the multi-blog switchover and the URL re-writing still isn’t perfect (categories and postnames are broken?) and I had to manually dump the DB and replace all the directory references for all of the uploaded media.

Otherwise the rest was just tweaking and tinkering. Lots of it.

I’ve got the forums FULLY integrated now with BuddyPress, so single account access, cookies, and users are able to post to group forums from within the group itself, and vice versa. It’s a neat little bridge and I rather like that it’s all playing nice. Hopefully upgrading to 1.0 or new alpha’s doesn’t TOTALLY break everything too badly, although I anticipate that it probably will. Yay!

I am going to be using BuddyPress to do a small social networking site for a non profit, that is going to be incorporating some school related content, so I will let you know how that goes and be sure to stay in touch as it progresses. I’ll link back to it here if we decide to incorporate bbPress.

[John James Jacoby]

Just upgraded the whole she-bang to BuddyPress with integrated bbPress. Phew! New theme to boot, with some new bbPress theme updates in the works.

[John James Jacoby]

Just because you’re brother and sister doesn’t mean you wear the same clothes.

You have a totally valid point, and I think once the development process is mostly *over* that making things pretty will be addressed, but right now I think the consensus is that making it all pretty is wasted effort because of how quickly each platform changes.

[John James Jacoby]

That makes sense, and I think it’s a really good way to say that neither platform has 100% of the things that anyone wants, hence the pluggable nature of them.

It sounds to me like you want BuddyPress without the WordPress MU capability, which is totally possible to do. I’m in the process of mirating a WP/BP integration to BuddyPress myself, and I think it’s exactly what I’ve been trying to modify WP/BP to do with plugins and hacks.

[John James Jacoby]

I always scratch my head at this one and ask myself “what’s the point?”

Not trying to sound like an ass, but I really do not understand why.

Logically I think to myself that if you really want it to work that way, then why even use WordPress at all? Just use bbPress and have a forum sans all the blogginess.

[John James Jacoby]

I wish that bbPress could incorporate the same type of threaded functionality that WordPress has, because I think it just works amazingly well.

[John James Jacoby]

It would be nice if the /forum/ could be totally removed

…and to be given the option to be changed to be the name of the forum you are viewing when viewing a topic, similar to WordPress…

[John James Jacoby]

On the site you’ve included above, you have a “current_page_ancestor” class. I have never seen that before, and it also isn’t what the bbp and wp sites use, making this even curiouser. You also have “page_folder” for the pages that have sub items, and again, I’ve never seen this before.

Looks like I have homework to do?

[John James Jacoby]

I don’t even know how to respond anymore, because really there is no way to defend myself while I’m in someone elses house. I can only speculate what Sam’s duties with Automattic are, because it’s none of my business. I can only assume from what I’ve read (where it’s been hinted at) that Sam is the sole developer behind bbPress, because again it’s none of my business who’s working on it really.

Suffice it to say that I think it’s really sad that my above response was met with such hostility and defensiveness, especially from someone holding the responsibility of moderation, considering there never really was any offense that I see dignified that kind of response. I really didn’t mean any harm or attitude; I even mentioned that I knew I was risking sounding a little off tone, but I think the question is probably a semi valid one, and I can’t speak for anyone else but myself when I ask…

I’m neither complaining, nor banging away. I’ve filed trac tickets and proposed solutions where I felt I qualified enough to supply one. I’ve written my own plugins and modified existing ones to work for specific situations. If what you think is that I’m pressuring or pestering anyone for anything, than I think that there’s a misunderstanding from the get go. I’m not saying it isn’t on my end, but what I will say is that I feel I’ve done my best to be friendly, contribute, and understand how the bbPress family is trying to run business here. I ask that you try to realize that to the new comer, some of what you all have come to know as common knowledge may not be for others, and that maybe… Just maybe, there are better ways to moderate a forum and still get your point across… Again, maybe it’s just me, but moderators typically wear many hats, sometimes one of which is the bouncer at the front door, protecting the crowd. I don’t see this forum as having a particularly riotous clientel, so I can’t say that much muscle is really even necessary…

Okay I’m rambling now…

My point being, that if Sam’s only job is to work on bbPress for Automattic, and he hasn’t been around or made any updates or changes, then I’d like to apply for his job.

[John James Jacoby]

You know, it’s responses like that, that really tend to make sour what is otherwise the sweet enthusiasm of enjoying being part of a growing project. I mean no disrespect to anyone on this forum; developers, moderators, etc… But quite honestly it’s that type of holier than thou attitude that is going to upset your core audience…

1. I’m here because I want to be.
2. I’m here because I can be.
3. I’m here on my own schedule, just like Sam.
4. If that’s really how you feel, then the reasons I’m here shouldn’t matter.
5. This isn’t rushing, this is a valid question; “What is it you say you do here?”
6. You shouldn’t talk to people like they are children.
7. Thanks for the… er… warning I guess, Tom Smykowski.

[John James Jacoby]

You know, at the risk of sounding like a snot, I’ve actually had a similar thought. The only thing stopping me from saying the same thing is that I have no idea what else it is that Sam does.

[John James Jacoby]

@ganzua: I predict that you are integrated with WordPress, and that your jQuery isn’t being loaded correctly.

I will prove this theory by asking for you to add a topic to your favorites on your forum, and report back and let me know if it works.

[John James Jacoby]

This is how phpBB already works.

I think its a good idea though.

[John James Jacoby]

That’s an interesting proposal. I’ll be honest and say I have no experience using any database in a multilanguage situation, but with that being said, how does a database store information in multiple languages, and can bbPress even do something like this? Would certain forums display RTL if necessary? It’s kind of a neat idea really.

[John James Jacoby]

Yeah this has been on the roadmap since .7, and I’m willing to bet once the minor 1.0 tweaks are taken care of that attention will be paid towards getting the JS squared away.

[John James Jacoby]

The reason why “full integration” isn’t ‘recommended’ is because WordPress is pretty sloppy with the number of database queries that it runs, sometimes into the hundreds per page load. bbPress tends to be very efficient in this department, so going from 9 queries to 30 queries for no real reason doesn’t make sense.

_ck_ made a topic about how to create a query without doing full integration, and I highly recommend using that method in most instances. It will allow you to have much more control over what you’re doing and how it’s doing it.

For the sake of being easy, full integration will provide you with every available WordPress function and ability, many of which you will never need or use. I personally am using full integration because I’m still poking my head around trying to figure out what’s all possible to do with it, and it does work very well, just a little slower than a non-fully integrated install of bbPress.

[John James Jacoby]

It would actually be really easy to build in bbPress theme functionality into the get_header and get_footer functions of WordPress, and I’ve thought about doing that in a few of the themes I’m making. Let me experiment this evening and report back.

[John James Jacoby]

Not the header files, but the wp-load.php file. You would want to include the absolute path to that file, so that your administration area is able to access it as well.

I am not at home currently but I can explain in more detail in a few hours.

[John James Jacoby]

You know, I’ve thought about this type of thing, and I think that bbPress really tries to hide the forum layout as much as possible. It doesn’t surprise me that it would work this way, as super stickies tend to really act like forum wide announcements than as stickies. That being said, showing them in a forum that’s already halfway hidden is a little redundant.

bbPress really does work much differently than your typical forum, and it takes a little massaging to make it feel like phpBB or vBulletin.